After a few last minute mishaps, we’re off to Paris tomorrow. My daughter will turn 13 there on Sunday. I told her any visitor who turns 13 in Paris, who enters their teens, will have a good love life when they’re older. She bought this, and I was glad she accepted it as a superstition possibly in currency beyond her own mother’s mind. I think of how my father and step-mother told me they’d had an astrologist do everyone in the family’s charts –I was about 13 at the time– and they sat me down one day and said oh how we hate to say this but your chart shows that you’re going to have a life of suffering - a sad suggestion I often refer back to.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to Paris, also to suffering there. I’ve never been much of a francophile, but I do love the country’s red wines, the perfumes of Guerlain and Chanel, the word fromage, which is so droll, and especially Eric Satie and Guillaume Apollinaire, whose “Montparnasse” is one of the few poems I know by heart. I learned it in French by singing it to the music composed for the poem by Poulenc.
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5 comments:
That's fantastic. I love what you 'gave' her as well, I good love life is a grand gift. I think especially if it's broadly interpreted.
The next time I turn 13 I'm heading to Paris to eat frommage, drink wine and dabble in a love life.
Ha! That's what I said, too. If only I'd been in Paris when I turned 13. Instead I was in South Plainfield.
I was as well. Perhaps the corralation in being in a NJ borough when you enter your teens embues you with - a bad love life, cheez wiz, cheap beer, an overwrought imagination and wanderlust? 1 out of 5's not bad. Cheez Wiz is a good fall back.
What a terrible thing for a father to do to his daughter, tell her she's destined for a life of suffering. A man with that kind of a mean streak didn't deserve children. I hope you told him so one day.
-blue
my dad is actually a pretty kind person, but sometimes he lacks certain sensibilities.
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